nljug_logo.pngYesterday was the bi-yearly event organized by the NLJug or the Dutch java user group. I like to attend these events mainly because it feels like a reunion. I see a lot of people from previous employers and people that I know from others events. Therefore this is a welcome day to feed your network. Another reason to go there is to try to learn something. I must admit that I do not think the overall quality of the sessions is very good. Still there are always some sessions that do have the level of quality and depth I like to see. Usually I tend to skip the key note, but this year we had no stand. So all the people from JTeam could freely walk around. Therefore I decided to sit the keynote out as well. WOW, that was a very good choice. The guys from atos origin created a very cool application with flex and some hardware for receiving sms and pictures. These were shown on the screen immediately. So we could actually interact. But the guy that made it happen was using the texts and photo’s to sing songs. Hard to explain, but you should have been there. To my opinion this was the best keynote at the nljug events ever. So thank you atos origin.

In all it was a nice day, to bad we now had tickets for the drinks. Mabe we should as a fee of 10 euro and then make it free again? Or even better, a fee of 50 euro, less sponsoring, better food, etc.

During the event I went to a few sessions as well:

  • JSR 308, “Annotations on Java Types”
  • People vs Process, cultural patterns
  • Spring integration

Read on to find out what these sessions were about and where you can find more information if you are curious.

JSR 308: Annotations on Java Types

This was a non scheduled talk, I cannot remember the name of the person that gave this talk. I only have a link were you can find more information on jsr 308. It was a nice talk about adding new type to java using annotations. Let me try to give you a very simpe example to explain what they were talking about.

Imagine yo have a method excepting an object that should not be null. You can now create such an object by specifying the following:

public void doSomething(@NonNull Object obj) { ... }

If you call this method and pass an object that could be null because you did not specify this annotation on that object, you will get a compiler exception. So we have two different type, Object and a NonNull Object.

There are more annotations available, like @ReadOnly and @Interning. Using these techniques can prevent a lot of runtime problems while doing static checks. They compared NullPointer problem prevention with tools like findbugs and pmd. This new technique gave much better results.

There is a catch however. I do not know how many of you are working with java 7? I do not know how many of you are confident of checking out the jdk, applying a patch and compile it yourself? Well I am not, then it is very hard to use it. So it is nice for the future. I do believe something like this will help us get better code, so I will keep track of it.

People vs Process – Cultural patterns …

http://www.nljug.org/pages/events/content/jspring_2008/sessions/00023/

When the sessions started I was not very optimistic, but it turned out oke. I think it was a nice session, especially because I have read the book about Toyota and about Lean Manufacturing the last months. In this presentation Marc Evers was talking about his experience with transitions from one Cultural module to another one. He explained the differences between six Cultural patterns: Variable, Steering, Oblivious, Anticipation, Congruent and Routine.

Very nice presentation and thoughts, I’ll blog something more about this when I am done reading the books.

Plumbing your Enterprise application with Spring Integration

When I was at The spring Experience in Miami, Roel en Allard visited a presentation about spring integration. Roel liked the concept and gave a demo and presentation at our mini miami experience evening. So I had some background, but i wanted to see Iwein Fuld in action. Iwein gave a very nice presentation about integration patterns and how spring integration can help implementing these. I liked the comparison with Coffee drinking at star bucks. I am not going into detail about spring integration, refer to the springframework website or the blog of Iwein. I am also trying to convince Roel in writing for this blog. So maybe if he reads this, he will write a nice item about spring integration for this blog 🙂

Concluding

A good day, some nice presentations, very good key-note, not so good food, drinking tickets but most of all a lot of fun. See you at j-Fall.

NLJug J-Spring 2008
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3 thoughts on “NLJug J-Spring 2008

  • April 19, 2008 at 8:54 pm
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    Hi Jettro, It is difficult to find the optimal balance between the “free” event and the food. Any recommendations would be appreciated. Requesting a fee would create some disappointed faces….and probably we have to drop a session. Reason: everybody has to pay at the entrance (until we have more manpower to create a very sexy webapp to handle this)…

  • April 17, 2008 at 11:27 am
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    He Goran,
    Why not a presentation on REST 🙂
    Freddie

  • April 17, 2008 at 10:43 am
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    Sounds like an interesting day. Thanks for the summary!

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